Sandy Santori remembers the dark cloud that covered Trail, BC, as of May 18, 1980. He filled the sky with a colorless gloom, since the fine ashes fell to the ground.
“It was simply not sun. It was bleak, gray, black. It was scary,” he said.
Santori was 26 years old, and he found out for the first time about the situation when his mother called him outside the house. There was a scene on the street. Its neighbors, mostly Italian Canadians, hurriedly covered their newly planted gardens, insecure where the fine and dusty ashes came from.
“Everyone at that time thought there was a malfunction in Teck Cominco and that they were emitting some of the [smelter] Pilas that we had never seen before, “said Santori, who would later become mayor of Trail, a Minister of Cabinet of MLA and BC.
In a short time, the voice was ran through the community that the ash came from Mount St. Helens, a volcano that had exploded with a tremendous force that morning, more than 450 kilometers away in the state of Washington.
The eruption of May 18 is considered the worst volcanic disaster in the history of the United States. He killed almost 60 people and altered landscapes in the state of Washington.
In Canada, the effects were not so lethal, but they still felt in southern BC.
Blast wave strikes vancouver
It began on the southern coast of BC, when the explosion wave of the eruption bounced in the upper atmosphere and returned to the Earth in the Vancouver subway and south of the island of Vancouver.
CBC News news that was issued a year after the eruption described that the explosion was “a little smaller than the necessary strength to eliminate each window” in Vancouver and Victoria.
Ian Thomson was a 27 -year -old geologist at that time. He was at his parents in West Vancouver when he heard the explosion. He had been closely following the history of Mount St. Helens, since the volcano had been increasingly active in the months prior to the eruption. But the sound still came as a mystery.
“Suddenly I heard a great explosion,” he said. “Something must have exploded.”
Thomson thought that perhaps the trains had collided in a near rail courtyard, or that his sister could have driven a car next to the house.
In five minutes, he said, there was a radio news bulletin that explained that the volcano had exploded.
“My second thought was: ‘Gee, I bet this is not good,” he said, thinking about the tragedy that was developed in Washington.
Ashes
After the explosion wave came the ash. The fine particles took hours, and even days in some places, to get from the volcano to the communities in southern BC, where he covered the landscape.
The Santori trail community was close to the concentrated column of volcanic ashes and smoke, which mostly moved away northeast from Mount St. Helens in places like Creston, Fernie and even Lethbridge, Alta.
Further north, in Kamloops, BC, Paula Kelley, a 22 -year -old accountant in the local newspaper, witnessed that the ashes arrived. It had been a sunny day with clouds, before starting to appear.
“I was in the center of the city, so you could see falling everywhere and you would see it in all cars. Everyone had to clean their windshield and everything and it is simply, as we were all thinking, ‘as, this is far away,” Kelley said. “It was really strange.”
He described it as a kind of dystopic, although no one seemed to wear masks or anything to protect themselves from volcanic ash. In a week, the city, which is more than 500 kilometers from the volcano, had returned to normal, with little trace of the ash, Kelley said.
Investigating ash
Britta Jensen, geologist and associated professor at the University of Alberta, is part of a team that has been investigating the way Mount St. Helens Ash spread in Canada. He said that before his team began his work in 2019, little was known on the subject: the dispersion maps stopped at the border with Canada-United States.
“Most places in BC, even high [ash] Accumulation rates: it probably would not have been much more than a thickness of a credit card, perhaps two, so perhaps two millimeters, one more or less millimeter, “said Jensen.
Santori remembers having to handle the car and the entrance path, washing the ashes in the storm’s drains. He says it was not like forest ashes, but much faster, like a dust that became mud when he got wet.
Jensen’s team surveyed about 400 people who remembered ash, even listening to people as far as Edmonton and Yellowknife with evidence of fine dust.
“Many people mentioned how things darkened. As everything was much darker and I imagine how apocalyptic I would feel if you were sitting there and it was a beautiful sunny day and that this huge cloud entered and blocked the sun,” he said.
Jensen, who has examined Ash deposits of Mount St. Hens throughout the west of Canada, says that the 1980 eruption was on the smallest side compared to what took place during the previous 4,000 years.
“Mount St. Helens has this incredible history of eruption and eruption,” he said. “She built and then explodes the upper part. We look at her album and I could see that another eruption occurs in our lives, but perhaps 200 years will arrive from now on, we don’t know.”
45 years have passed since Mount St. Helens broke out, and scientists say he will explode again in our lives. Johanna Wagstafffe breaks what will make it different from the deadly explosion in 1980 and how current technology is giving us an early alert system.
